Gadgetory

for around $200 the nexus7 Android tablet is a fantastic value with it you can browse the web check your email catch up on videos play games and generally distract yourself for hours at a time unfortunately sometimes these things get cracked one bad fall on the screen can suddenly stop working and for something that relies entirely on touchscreen input that's basically the end of the line or is it I'm Donald Bell and in this how-to I'm going to show you how to salvage an Android tablet with a broken screen and turn it into a dedicated ebook reader this Nexus 7 is perfectly fine I didn't break it for the purpose of this video but I'm going to get this thing going so that I won't have to use the screen at all now the first problem is that your broken screen may be partly responsive to touch or maybe not responsive at all so to get around this we're going to temporarily rig up this thing we're going old-school USB mouse you take the mouse you connect up to this which is a USB OTG adapter you can find these for a couple bucks online connect the mouse to the USB adapter and then connect the microUSB end to your tablet now you should see a mouse that you can move around and click and drag and navigate around your tablet with no touchscreen required next let's go into the system settings and make this tablet easier to unlock without having to swipe on the screen click the app folder and locate settings click it and open up security the first setting here is screen lock now we're going to set this to none now this is gonna leave your tablet totally unprotected so if you have any sensitive accounts or email still on here you'll probably want to delete them the upshot is that you can unlock this tablet just by tapping on the wake button no pin number is no swiping it just turns on now back to the home screen you'll need to pick or download an e-book reader app that you'll want to use now the key feature we're looking for from this app is the ability to use the tablet's volume buttons to turn the pages instead of relying on the touch screen now you can do this with Google's own playbooks app you can also do this with the Amazon Kindle app or a more open option you could try cool reader which is free and supports every open eBook format Under the Sun now to get these working the same trick applies in every case you open up the app locate the app settings and look for an option for volume button control make sure it's selected and then back out to the main menu find a book that you're gonna want to read and give it a shot by tapping the volume buttons once it's working open up a book that you plan on reading for a while and then unplug your mouse because from here on out you can use the volume buttons to page forward and backwards and you can use the sleep button to switch the screen on or off you'll still want to keep this mouse around whenever you want to change books or if you ever run out of battery and need to relaunch the app so it's not a perfect solution but at least you save this tablet from the junk pile so that's all there is to it hopefully that'll give you a little more mileage from your cracked Android tablet for more videos like this visit how to cnet.com i'm donald bell thanks for watching